Nor should it be forgotten that the tremendous movement of recent years which has so multiplied standard reading-matter, both periodicals and books, has reached the farm. A census of country post-offices will reveal the fact that the standard magazines go regularly to thousands of farm homes. Agricultural papers, religious papers, and even dailies find multitudes of intelligent readers among farmers.
With the advent of better highways, electric car lines, rural free delivery, and the rural telephone, each of which is looming on the horizon as an important feature of American farm life; with the Grange or similar organization in every school district; with the development of courses for women at all our colleges of agriculture, and the logical complement of such courses in the form of college extension—farmers' institutes, reading-courses, traveling libraries, lecture and correspondence courses—we shall find farm life taking on a new dress, and perhaps farmers' wives may come to enjoy the envy of those women who are unfortunate enough not to have married farmers.
CHAPTER XII
THE COUNTRY CHURCH AND PROGRESS
The only way to an understanding of the relation of the church to rural progress is through an appreciation of the place which the church as a social institution may have among other social institutions affecting rural life. Moreover, to know the value of these institutions one must first know the rural social needs. May we not then, even at the risk of repetition, take a brief survey of these needs and institutions, in order that we may more clearly attain the proper point of view?
At the outset let us be sure that we have sympathy with the countryman as such. It is often argued that the rural question, or any phase of it, as for instance the question of the rural church, is important because the country supplies the best blood to the city—and a roll-call of the famous country-born is read to prove the point. This may be all true. But it is only a partial view, for it places the emphasis upon the leaving of the farm, whereas the emphasis should be placed upon the farm and those who stay there. We may praise the country because it furnishes brain and brawn for the world's work; we may argue for country life because it possesses a good environment in which to rear a family; we may demand a school system that shall give the country child as good a chance as the city child has. In all this we do well. But we do not yet stand face to face with the rural problem.
For the rural problem is the problem of those who farm. It is the problem of the man behind the plow. It is he that is the center of interest. His business, his success, his manhood, his family, his environment, his education, his future—these constitute the problem of the farm. Half our people make their living from the brown soil. In virtue, in intelligence, in real worth, this half compare favorably with the other half who saw wood, and shovel sand, and pull throttles, and prepare briefs, and write sermons. The business of agriculture provides directly for the material welfare of nearly forty millions of our people. It supports gigantic railway systems, fills the hulls of immense ships, furnishes raw material for thousands of industries. This rural hemisphere of American economic and social life is surely worthy the thought of the captain of industry, of the statesman, of the economist, of the educator, of the preacher. We may also, without danger of being put to confusion, assume that the tiller of the soil is in essential character very much like other people. Farmer nature is usually a fair specimen of human nature. Nevertheless the environment of the farmer is a peculiar one. Individually as well as socially he is comparatively isolated. He meets but little social friction. The class to which he belongs is largely a segregated class, physically and socially.
All these things give to the rural social problem a distinctive character and give rise to the great social needs of the farmer. What are these needs? I name three: (1) Completer organization. Farmers do not co-operate easily. They never had to co-operate largely under the old régime, for pioneer farming placed a premium on individualism. The present century however, with its emphasis upon organization and co-operation, calls the farmer to the task with the warning cry that unless he does organize he is in danger of losing his present industrial, political, and social status. (2) Better education. The rural schools may not be so deficient as to deserve all the scorn heaped upon them by educational reformers; but it is little enough to say that they can be vastly improved. They are not keeping up with city schools. The country is especially lacking in good high-school privileges. Of technical training too, in spite of forty years of agricultural colleges, the country is sadly in need. Neither in primary grades, in high schools, in special schools, is there an adequate amount of study of the principles of agriculture—principles which an age of science demands must be mastered if the independent farmer is to be a success. (3) Quicker communication. Isolation has been the bugbear of farm life. It must be overcome partly by physical means. There must be a closer touch between individuals of the class, and between farmers and the dwellers in the town and city.